Читать книгу Mechanisms of cultural evolution - Victor Efremenko - Страница 20

On the trajectory of biological evolution, HS was retained by those adaptations that had been developed in previous periods.

Genetic adaptations are always a modification of the genome to the previous environmental conditions and in this sense they are obsolete, since the environmental conditions themselves change over time.

So, for example, in Africa, the homeland of HS, lions still live in prides, marking their territory. Any lion who invades someone else’s territory is considered by the leader of the pride as an enemy that must be expelled or destroyed. After all, the habitat is a matter of feeding the pride.

Likewise, the ancient hunter-gatherers considered the enemy of any HS located on their territory that did not belong to their family. This is where aggression is needed to destroy or expel a stranger.

We must understand that this behavior is genetically determined, we can even say that this is a genetic adaptation, which also sits in our genes in a somewhat softened form. This adaptation manifests itself as an instinct that creates a certain pattern of behavior.

Even in recent times, primitive people not only killed their enemies, but did it with special cruelty – they buried them alive, scalped them, and so on. They did it without any apparent need, by order of their primitive instinct. Such behavior is described by Charles Darwin, who observed how the natives on Tierra del Fuego were killed by the colonists simply because «they quickly multiply.»

Consequently, in order to overcome (restrain the innate instinct) of aggression, it is required to create in the brain some moral prohibitions that block this instinct. It is necessary to change the mentality of a person by changing the functional state of individual brain nodes in the process of education. Religions have served this purpose.

Therefore, in the religious information about the «correct faith», in addition to information about the structure of the universe, there was also information of a certain moral ethical nature. The examples showed how to behave in a society of their own kind and described the punishments that, in the event of violation of these moral standards, will be imposed on the guilty person after his death on this Earth. Life was supposed to be eternal, and the soul was immortal, so punishment is a serious punishment. Among these moral prohibitions was, as a rule, the principle of «Thou shalt not kill.» Religion has turned out to be an important institution of influencing the mentality of people in the sense of restraining aggression towards their own kind.

The introduction by the primitive religion of some moral norms and rules of human behavior in various situations, the creation of some general rules of prohibition, was very important for life in a social society.

Without these rules, as experience shows, the relationship turned out to be prohibitively cruel, and there could be no talk of any cooperation.

God or gods are present in all religions, but they are not the essence of religions. They should be viewed as a way of bringing religious knowledge from somewhere above, from a cult figure, so that believers do not even have a thought to challenge or modernize them. The fact is that the process of replicating information in the brain is not nearly as accurate as the process of DNA replication. Here, to make it more accurate, we need inaccessible gods in religions. They have no other functions. To confirm this thought, you can recall the game «Broken Phone», where after several replications, the information changes beyond recognition.

By introducing into the consciousness of religious rules of behavior that limited aggression, providing for punishment for violations of prescriptions, apparently, it was possible to curb this genetic adaptation to a significant extent (Aggression to a stranger). Note, not to destroy, but to curb, because we cannot rebuild the genome. And genes create innate instincts as a result of a cascade of sequential biochemical reactions that affect the nervous system and brain. There are no patterns of behavior directly in the genes; only the rules for constructing proteins from the 20 available amino acids are fixed in them.

Aggression is still bubbling inside us today, and the way out for it is blocked to one degree or another by moral prohibitions in the brain. It is costly to contain these emotions in terms of physical health. You have to pay for everything. But the payoff is greater. At this stage of the transition of the population from the existence of tribal tribes to the existence in the form of large agglomerations, where the individual’s aggression must be somehow curbed, religion has played, apparently, a significant role.

The same position on the unification of people (socialization) is held by the philosopher and economist of the liberal trend, Nobel laureate Friedrich Hayek in his work «Pernicious arrogance».

Quote.

«Often these rules (morality) forbade the individual to perform actions dictated by instinct. Forming actually new and different from the previous morality, they restrain and suppress «natural morality», that is, those instincts that rallied the small group and ensured cooperation within it, blocking and making it difficult to expand.

However, the decisive factor in the transformation of an animal into a human was precisely the curbing of innate reactions caused by the development of culture.

The norms and habits learned in infancy become as much a part of our personality as that which was already guiding our behavior when the assimilation was just beginning.»